Album of the Week: Maisie Peters – 'Florescence'
A warm, witty and newly self-assured third album sees Maisie Peters lean into country-flecked acoustica, sharp-eyed confessionals and the restorative power of love
Maisie Peters was on BBC One’s The One Show when the boss called in to tell the nation what was good about her and why he’d signed her to his record label.
“[I] started off as a fan and then I met her and she’s a very, very fun girl. Very personable. But her songwriting ability was the first thing that was really striking to me, and how she portrays her emotions. She kind of reminds me a lot of myself at that age in what she writes about. I’m thrilled to be working with her.”
When the boss is Ed Sheeran, those words matter. As the singer-songwriter from smalltown Sussex, 21 at the time of the call, pithily pointed out, Sheeran – as well as running his own label, Gingerbread Man Records – is “obviously king of the radio and of England”.
Five years on from that chatshow moment, Peters recently announced her third record with another hefty co-sign: the Amelia Dimoldenberg-directed “album trailer” for Florescence. It features the musician scurrying around dressed as a daisy, tangling with a hen party and with a woman dressed as an olive. Naturally.
Florescence, as all we horticulturalists know, is “the process of flowering; the process of developing richly and fully”. Which is what Peters, now 25, has been doing for the past year. It’s a (re)growth that began after a whirlwind few years’ performing and touring – and supporting Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Noah Kahan – that washed her up, at the end of 2024, physically and mentally frazzled.
Cue reset, and cue trip to Nashville to work again with longtime collaborator and co-producer Ian Fitchuk (Kacey Musgraves, Chris Stapleton). Cue, too, luckily, the blossoming of a new relationship with her high school sweetheart. As she sings on the impossibly pretty, Paul Simon-esque ‘Audrey Hepburn’, “my heart was a hellhound, now my heart sits on your lap”.
Peters’ love dividend is all over this articulate, honest-sounding, refreshingly downhome album. For all her heavy-hitter backers, in an era of “pop girlies” going hell-for-leather-hotpants (no judgement), Peters is going full Sussex. Not so much try-hard as try-easy, Florescence is 15 tracks of sweetly sung, deftly played, country-tinged, lightly beats-flecked acoustica.
With that confidence and contentment comes a disarming candour. As she sings on the whispered, simple, stark opener ‘Mary Janes’: “My body’s not a temple, more a bachelorette pad… my teeth aren’t straight, my jeans are as cool as my music taste… I’m not the coolest or the greatest in the club, it doesn’t matter… who gives a fuck, when I’m in love…” Which is the kind of confessional that is, of course, cool AF.
‘Kingmaker’, a collaboration with American songwriter and singer Julia Michaels (co-writer no less of Justin Bieber’s unapologetically brilliant ‘Sorry’), floats on gentle upward draughts of synths and is a low-key banger. ‘Vampire Time’ is an earworm pop-folk anthem, complete with fiddles and flurries of harmonies, that will undoubtedly incite Peters’ rabidly engaged fanbase, as will ‘My Regards’, a Swiftian (Taylor, not Jonathan) masterclass in electronica-lite exuberance.
![Maisie Peters - My Regards [Official Music Video] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/x59r7Sy6jqA/maxresdefault.jpg)
As for the Nashville influence: that’s most directly evidenced in the wondrous, woodsy ‘If You Let Me’, a collaboration with, er, Wimbledon-raised Marcus Mumford, where the blend of his grainy tones and her bell-clear country vibes is truly transporting.
By the time we get, eventually, to the final, 15th song, the enraptured, Chris Martin-swaying-at-the-piano ballad ‘Nothing Like Being in Love’, we’ve fully felt Maisie Peters’ reinvigoration. Slightly overlong growing season aside, Florescence is bloomin’ marvellous.
